Round

I have never liked my hands. All my life I looked at other women’s hands and saw elegance and grace and I always saw a toddler’s chubby appendages at the end of my own arms. Chubby fingers, fatty hands. At least for the moment no wrinkles on them, which is small solace.

My hands get really fat around 200 pounds and I only see the faintest hint of veins in my hands around 170 pounds. I’ve never been at a weight where my hands were pretty.

Right now my fingers look like sausages and many of my rings don’t fit or can only be worn for a few hours before I worry about cutting off circulation. My wedding and engagement rings are really tight and if I have too much salt.. it’s not pretty. Sometimes my ring finger even tingled a little back when I started again at 215 pounds, and that tingling (which I know can be dangerous) was part of the motivation to get myself losing weight again - because I was not about to go without my wedding ring just to keep eating and eating. Right now I can get my engagement ring on and off but not the wedding ring…

I really want my rings to fit properly (and I secretly dream of having to have them resized several times as I lose!). I have several lovely rings my DH gave me for my birthday and other holidays a few years back that I can’t wear right now.

What I am waiting for is for my rings to be fitting properly again. And then to start getting loose.

Well, I had a rough afternoon and was wanting to cry, scream, hit someone and bury myself in a tub of vanilla ice cream. And pasta, and butter, and well, everything bland and fatty and soothing.

Instead I walked around my neighborhood for 20 minutes when I got home to give myself a few minutes to calm down and then drank a glass of water. Then had a yogurt and when I realized I was both hungry and munchy I peeled & sliced a large English cucumber (one of those 2-feet suckers) and ate the whole thing.

I now feel much better. Better because I took some time to calm down, better because I didn’t sabatoge my efforts of the past few weeks, and better because turning towards healthy solutions was at least as stress-relieving as the ice cream would have been.

I didn’t do so great at dinner - at least not at first. We had a fresh baguette (French bread), my nemesis, plus our awesome butter from a small independent producer… I had a small piece, then a second was starting and a memory from Dr Hope came back and I realized I was okay diet-wise as long as this WAS dinner (not in addition to it). That realization relaxed me and slowed me down. I ate the rest of my bread and butter savoring every bite and knowing calorie wise I was fine. Added a small amount of Greek salad and a yogurt to round out the meal (well, sort of rounded out) and called it good. No guilt for eating “bad foods”, no over-eating from eating bread and butter and then a dinner too.

…but I’m still going to throw away the ice cream that’s deep in the freezer — knowing it is there is weighing on me.

I had a good and focused week, really profiting from a heavy workload and traveling husband. Here’s how I did with my goals for the week :

1. Create daily intentions and keep it in mind all day - progress! I finally wrote a good intention statement and have been writing it out daily “My life expands as I take good care of my body”
2. Consistently make good food choices - yes yes yes!!! This is getting easier!
3. Keep daily track of the number of fruit & veggie servings - tracking this helps keep it in focus, my average for the week was 9 per day
4. Investigate your resistance to exercise. Make yourself a deadline to try the public pool and a date by which you will either be in a new plan or re-join the gym. - haven’t done it, it remains a goal for the next week
5. A four-day challenge : use my daily diet planning sheets TWICE a day to see what that double-dose adds - did well at this all week except the weekend — will keep it a goal

I’m going to stick to these same goals for next week, and try to make progress on the exercise one.

I lost one pound this week, bringing me to -9 pounds from my re-start. It feels like a drop in the bucket, but at the same time 9 pounds and several weeks is starting to feel like I’m on my way. I am looking forward to crossing the 10 pound mark and even more looking forward to kicking the 200’s to the curb. I’d like to do that before summer vacation, although I am really not a fan of time-based weight goals.

This coming week will not be an easy one. My team has a huge presentation on Friday which will keep me hopping until then (lots of meetings in hotels, lunches and dinner meetings too). Despite the conditions, I’m confident I can make good food choices during the week.

Friday night the pressure ends, but the weight-loss challenges begin. Dinner with a dear friend from out of town on Friday, and then we’re going away to the Champagne region for our 1st wedding anniversary - with quite a focus on fine dining and wine. We’re going to be staying at a chateau that has a top-rated restaurant, and we have a tasting scheduled at a fabulous small champagne producer. This will not be a weight-loss weekend (nor will it be a free-for-all).

My plan is to have a focused week on diet, try to walk some over the weekend, and to make decent choices this weekend. I have decided to skip next week’s weigh-in and weigh-in instead on the following Monday (June 16), when I will have had a week back on track.

My healthy diet is getting easier for me.  I have had a really good week - focused, veggie-filled, not feeling deprived.

Going away for this weekend wasn’t so easy.  First there was the lunch my DH prepared just before we left.  Very sweet of him to whip up an omelette for us all, but it was loaded with butter…  We also didn’t have enough water with us for our hike, and although I made decent choices at dinner, I was over-hungry and couldn’t resist the bread (nor the chocolate buttons before dinner).

The good news is I did walk (well, very light hiking) both Saturday and Sunday.  It felt good to move my body and fabulous to breath fresh country air.  Every time we go hiking (which isn’t often) I’m reminded how much I like it, and it’s something both my husband and I would like to do more often.

Breakfast this morning was tough - huge basket of bread and pastries, no fruit in sight…  I had bread w jam (lower cal choice than the pastry) and a plain yogurt.  Skipped the sweetened applesauce (which is not very healthy) and had a ton of coffee.  I purposefully went light on breakfast, but paid for it later when I was starving after our hike and very grouchy… Of course I didn’t make the best choices then either, because the one thing you can usually find open in France on a Sunday afternoon is a bakery, so bread it was…

Still, to focus on the positive I made generally healthy choices, I got in some exercise, and at all times I stayed in control of my eating and ate what I considered the “less bad” of my choices.  Sometimes that was 8 chocolate drops instead of the whole pack, sometimes 4 slices of bread instead of buying a slice of quiche or a chocolate croissant, but at all times I did manage to make the choices.  And that, my friends, is real progress.

I’ll repeat again my mantra (in hopes of convincing myself of it someday) :

PROGRESS, Not Perfection  

Glad to be home again — especially because next weekend we’re away again — and it will be EVEN HARDER!